Monday, September 23, 2013

Keiji Inafune Answers Your Mega Man & Mighty No. 9 Questions

Kotaku's live Q&A session with Keiji Inafune has wrapped. Those interested can read up on all of his responses here. Just for the heck of it, though, I've posted some of the more noteworthy Qs and As below. Check 'em out:

Ren2147: Will there be a counterpart to a certain long-haired beam swordsman in this game/franchise?

Keiji Inafune: There is a character with a sword in Mighty No. 9, who also happens to be red...but as for the hair, can't really say :)

HalberdierV2U:
Inafune-San, if the opportunity for you to buy the Mega Man franchise,
would you do it? also, how much support do you plan to give the 3DS and
Wii U in the near future with intended releases?

Keiji Inafune:
lol Well it's hard to say about Mega Man... Right now I'm really
focused on Mighty No. 9 — when I think of Mega Man now, it's less about
particular games and more about the spirit of those games that I want to
bring with me.

BeckerZ: If you will be a character in one of the game you've created (or drawn), what will this be? and why? [SIC]

Keiji Inafune:
I guess I would have to say Zero from the Mega Man X series... At least
that's who I'd want to be. He's not even a main character, but he's
just so damn cool and stylish, and slicing through everything with a
beam sword seems like fun heha

Yes, Inafune really, really loves Zero. It should be interesting to see if any of his design elements show up in this mysterious, red Mighty No. 9 character.

He isn't Mega Man, he isn't X, he isn't Aile/Vent... he has just one franchise. Maybe he is important for the whole classic megaman universe, but he isn't THE main character. Zero series is different, but he said:" I guess I would have to say Zero from the MEGA MAN X series".He was talking about HIS Zero.

For all the soft-skinned whiners who just got a bug up their butts because of Inafune's crack about Zero not being a "main character", it should probably be clarified that he probably meant "titular character", otherwise he's thinking in regards to the first Megaman X game (the one he was most directly involved in and has the most fondness for, and rightfully so) where Zero was an unplayable supporting character.

The thing I can't understand is why he would want to be Zero. Always dying and coming back to life, constantly emoting about his mysterious past, whining about his dead girlfriend, plagued by the eternal question: "What am I fighting fooooooooor?", nimrods couldn't tell what gender you were, and worst of all, being reborn as the nightmarish love child of Nanase Ohkawa and a Roswell alien and spending the rest of eternity wandering around a post-apocalyptic war zone with Navi faries from Ocarina of Time.

Never whined about the dead girlfriend that he killed, "what am I fighting for" was an affect of the game's bad dub and at least came out sounding like it was said by a guy unlike X's pansy little voice. Some couldn't or pretend to can't tell what gender he is due to idiocy and hatred. For example: I had one person say they did not know he was a guy in X4 till the end of the game, despite constant text directing them to that conclusion voice acting and story themes. Another example: someone said they didn't know what gender he was in the game intro stage of X1, I ask why, he says "he has long blonde hair, he is red and has green orb boobs" I proceed to name popular red characters with long blonde hair of the time such as Omega Red, Terry Bogard and Ken Masters and say his sprite in X1 never hand any green orb boobs. Thus exposing his lying deceit. Either way at least he is man enough to have a girlfriend in the first place, something not many other characters in the franchise have. Lastly nightmarish is subjective, but Nanase Ohkawa means the one perceiving is blind, Roswell alien in post apocalypses is not an insult dependent on context, and Ocarina of Time needs to get the hell out of here cause it didn't invent chibi distorted anatomy or everything in the universe like the internet might like to think.

So yeah seems pretty understandable that Keiji would want to be Zero and that Zero has haters.

Before anyone gets their hope up, the character in Mighty No 9 is NOT a zero-type character, or some "Mighty No. 0" as you like to call it, it's one of the bosses that uses a sword. You can see its silhouette in the kickstarter video around the 3:58 mark.